PE> Now that my system is back to "normal", I deleted
PE> all the partitions on my 4th physical hard disk
PE> (2.5 gig) and repartitioned it, as 5, 500, 5, 1929, 5.

Why so many 5MB partitions ?

PE> However, I cannot get fdisk (during the OS/2 installation) to set
PE> the 500 meg partition to "installable".  Is there some limitation
PE> of OS/2 that I cannot boot off the 2nd pair of IDE drives?

The short story is that I dunno, there is something a bit odd with the
OS/2 FDISK and that sort of thing and I havent gone to the trouble of
thoroughly analysing just whether its basically a bug/quirk that causes
it to do that in some particular situations, particularly with some
particular combination of the cmos entry for the drive and LBA etc or
what. Its a pretty long winded exercise trying that with various OS/2s
and various motherboards etc and I just havent ever managed to get that
keen to do so, particularly as OS/2 appears to not have that much future IMO.

The other possibility is to do something with the OTHER FDISKS like
with Linux etc, particularly with source code, but again, I havent.

PE> I defined all the partitions as "extended logical".  I have
PE> LBA enabled in my BIOS on both 2.5 gig drives. When my SCSI
PE> drive was my 3rd physical drive, I was able to install to it.

Yeah, thats what I meant, there does appear to be some association
there between what it sees of the controller etc and that limitation.
The other thing that needs to be thoroughly checked out is whether
say not enabling LBA helps with that limitation too. Thats obviously
less desirable tho for other reasons, particularly plain DOS booted.

PE> P.S. I've sussed out the problem.  OS/2, for whatever reason, requires
PE> the ENTIRE installable partition to be located in the first 504 meg.

It APPEARS to require that. But as you can see from
your experience with the SCSI drive, aint that absolute.

The reason for that is quite straight forward, the motherboard bios is
booting the partition very early on, and *IT* suffers from that 1024
cylinder limit, and hence 504MB. *BUT* a decent motherboard bios doesnt
have that limitation when the drive is used with LBA enabled, and its
not clear if the OS/2 FDISK is just not allowing for that, or it thinks
it has concluded that a PARTICULAR motherboard bios cant boot that.

I think its most likely that the OS/2 FDISK is just having
a brain fart and isnt intelligent enough about it when LBA
is enabled on an IDE drive, but is with a SCSI drive.

PE> Logical partition is fine.

Yeah, its only ever been a problem with partitions you want to boot.

PE> The NEXT problem is that I defined 100, 200, 2000+ partitions, and
PE> then attempted to install on the 200 meg partition.  And guess what?
PE> I've managed to reproduce the exact same error I got before!  I set
PE> the 200 meg partition as installable, the OS/2 installation program
PE> formatted the partition for me, then proceeded to load the first half
PE> of OS/2 on the partition.  It then asked me to reboot, and I did, and
PE> instead of continuing with the installation it said "No operating system
PE> found - system halted". Exactly the same as it did the original time!

I did wonder if maybe it was managed to have a brain fart on the
LBA etc. In other words at some times in the install and reboot
it is using the drive in LBA mode, and at other times its not,
producing that effect where what it can see on the drive changes.

I've also heard some rather vague and unspecific reports of
some oddity with pentiums and that Quantum Sirrocco drive too.
Its not even clear if its a real effect of just user error.

PE> And then, I rebooted off my normal partition, and guess what?
PE> The installation disk, wouldn't chkdsk, it says an "unrecoverable
PE> error occurred".  From memory, I got an error like this before.
PE> Can't remember how I got around that one, might have used OS/2 2.1
PE> instead or something. Anyway, now that I've got a reproducable error,
PE> what is your theory as to what went wrong?

Hard to say. Like I said, you really need to do it completely systematically,
start with a very simple config of just one of those 2.5GB drives by itself,
try the various combinations of LBA and NORMAL in the cmos, various OS/2
versions, more than one motherboard, and ideally even the Linux etc and
just get a real handle on whats going on. Particularly if its just OS/2
having a brain fart. Thats most likely.

Corse there is a real sense in which its academic anyway, you can just
let it have its way and make the installable partition below the 504MB.

PE> Like I said, in the first installation, everything looked fine,
PE> after all, I managed to install half of bloody OS/2 before the
PE> disk got corrupted.  Now I know it's not my imagination, it's
PE> happening right now, right before my very eyes.  I have a theory
PE> that if I switch my BIOS from LBA to "LARGE" (I think I have such an
PE> option), OS/2 might be able to install.  I will try that sometime soon.

That gets even more tricky, because the bios is doing translations
behind your back, particularly very early on in the boot phase and
presumably also to FDISK, tho that would need to be carefully checked too.
@EOT:

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